"Marriott's poetry since The Wind Our Enemy and culminating in The Circular Coast (1969-1979), we hope to show, has tended to be essentially Iyrical with narrative elements. It has been through a unique fusion of lyric and narrative that she has found her best poetic voice. The brevity of the lyric form has made it possible for her to undertake a close examination of language, the result of which has been that her poems tend to be situated in a metaphorical landscape, one characterized by the west coast as border, as frontier. This amounts to a major shift in emphasis."